Paul Diacres, and the poems
contained in the Bangor antiphonary which he sometimes read for the
alphabetical and mono-rhymed hymn sung in honor of Saint Comgill, the
literature limited itself almost exclusively to biographies of saints,
to the legend of Saint Columban, written by the monk, Jonas, and to
that of the blessed Cuthbert, written by the Venerable Bede from the
notes of an anonymous monk of Lindisfarn, he contented himself with
glancing over, in his moments of tedium, the works of these
hagiographers and in again reading several extracts from the lives of
Saint Rusticula and Saint Radegonda, related, the one by Defensorius,
the other by the modest and ingenious Baudonivia, a nun of Poitiers.

But the singular works of Latin and Anglo-Saxon literature allured him
still further. They included the whole series of riddles by Adhelme,
Tatwine and Eusebius, who were descendants of Symphosius, and
especially the enigmas composed by Saint Boniface, in acrostic
strophes whose solution could be found in the initial letters of the
verses.

His interest diminished with the end of those two centuries. Hardly
pleased with the cumbersome mass of Carlovingian Latinists, the
Alcuins and the Eginhards, he contented himself, as a specimen of the
language of the ninth century, with the chronicles of Saint Gall,
Freculfe and Reginon; with the poem of the siege of Paris written by
Abbo le Courbe; with the didactic _Hortulus_, of the Benedictine
Walafrid Strabo, whose chapter consecrated to the glory of the gourd
as a symbol of fruitfulness, enlivened him; with the poem in which
Ermold the Dark, celebrating the exploits of Louis the Debonair, a
poem written in regular hexameters, in an austere, almost forbidding
style and in a Latin of iron dipped in monastic waters with straws of
sentiment, here and there, in the unpliant metal; with the _De viribus
herbarum_, the poem of Macer Floridus, who particularly delighted him
because of his poetic recipes and the very strange virtues which he
ascribes to certain plants and flowers; to the aristolochia, for
example, which, mixed with the flesh of a cow and placed on the lower
part of a pregnant woman's abdomen, insures the birth of a male child;
or to the borage which, when brewed into an infusion in a dining room,
diverts guests; or to the peony whose powdered roots cure epilepsy; or
to the fennel which, if placed on a woman's breasts, clears her water
and stimulates the indolence of he